Last few days I have devoted quite a lot of thinking and energy
to my EcoMole twitter
account and have realized that I have once in a lifetime
opportunity to capture my development from a twitter novice to a
seasoned tweeting expert in real time. I am an organic chemist by
education (Ph.D. UCL) who spent thousands of hours in research labs
and was used to logging observations into a notebook. Now, fifteen
years later and living in a virtual world it is time to prepend
b and start to blog observations
here.

The first post at EcoMole account was published
on the 8th April and six days later it displays 297
tweets, 297 followed, 62 followers, and 16 lists (I keep most of my
followed accounts in some of these lists). Quite a few of my tweets
were already retweeded several times. I am well aware that many
interactions and some followers are silicon based but quite a few
of them are already composed of carbon and other biogenic elements
and that is nice. :)

I am not a total novice to the Twitter world as I have another
account which I was using 5 years ago. But I used to tweet there
just few announcements about new materials at Zvon.org and ceased to do it soon.

This time I have entered better prepared. In recent weeks I read
a lot of articles around the web and then searched for some books
for my Kindle. Quite a lot of e-books have been already written
about this topic and some are available for free. I have downloaded
and read all the free ones, and found the following to be the most
useful:

To be honest, I do not need much persuasion to turn from
programming to writing, but it is good to know that I am not
procrastinating but fulfilling one of my most important
responsibilities. :)

I am also an
avid reader who reads a lot of psychology books. There is no
other way to sustain high activity on Twitter than to make it
meaningful for myself personally. Fortunately in this respect, I
love all kinds of science and I have strong teacher reflexes: share
as much knowledge as you can, not minding many defenses on the
other side of the classroom.

My simple rule of sharing therefore is: to share anything I
personally find interesting but only after checking the original
source. After all I am a scientist as well.

Being a heavy computer user from time when personal computers
were heavy, testing and using proper tools is also deeply ingrained
in my problems' solution style. Thus I have tried quite a few
tools, and at this moment, I am regularly using:

Pictures are very useful to attract more attention and while I
am definitively not an artist I still manage to produce some own
pictures with help of Inkscape and OpenClipart library, which offers
both an excellent licence policy Unlimited Commercial Use and
many excellent images.

I have already wrote longer than even my high priorities permit
so I will return to my other experiences in a few days time. It
would be nice if I could find you among my followers at @ecomole_com. ;)